Dark of the moon

A time of creeping statis. I don’t want to do anything. I could happily crawl into bed and stay there all day, basking in sleepiness.

It’s the dark of the moon. At this time it seems to me that everything active, yang, and exterior wants to come to a halt. The energies for change, action and movement are low. It’s a good time for withdrawing, for contemplation.

But I’m feeling things beyond that.

Not depression exactly. Grief, partly. The loss of two extended family members in the space of weeks. One sudden and shocking, the other, sadly anticipated, to some extent for years.

I’m also getting over ten days of extreme editing. (‘Extreme Editing’ might make a good business name – why haven’t I thought about it before?) I was asked to edit a long, complex report on a topic I had some familiarity with.

A cold slowly hatched itself, invading my brain with a sullen, quiet exhaustion. The report came in two parts, the first part unfinished while I was editing the second. I was too cottonballed to stress about it.

I hunkered down for a long stretch of concentrated thinking. I don’t know where I drew the energy from to carry on. I’m a low energy person at the best of times, and here I was with a full-blown cold and a tight deadline.

The cold was a textbook one – not, I kept telling myself, the infamous swine flu. First utter exhaustion without other symptoms, then a violent persistent cough that got worse at night (by the third night I had learned to cough in my sleep). Then a hopelessly runny nose for three days. And the horrific body image problems, looking in the mirror at the red rimmed eyes and nostrils, the swollen cheeks, the unwashed hair, and thinking I had never looked so ugly.

Struggling to finish editing the report, I didn’t get beyond the front and back yards of my flat for six days. Towards the end I was running out of vegetables, meat and fish. The last morning I breakfasted on brown rice.

It wasn’t that drastic in terms of actual hours -- I didn’t slave away till 1 in the morning, as I had on previous jobs in the long ago, enthusiastic days when I still believed I could make it as a full time editor. In fact, I got quite good at intuitively knowing when I had done enough for one day. It’s just that, even resting, I didn’t have enough energy in those last few days to get properly dressed and drive to the supermarket.

At times like this that I am confronted by the reality of not having a partner, and the huge practical difference that makes. Ideally, partners can support each other’s careers at different times in reciprocal ways, leveraging the partnership so that both have a better chance of success. I fantasised during this busy time of someone humming away in the background, cheerfully asking me if I was hungry as I slaved away, and what time would I like dinner? Instead, dinner was often fried eggs or a bowl of cooked chickpeas!

My body and mind are now claiming their payment. They demand rest. I want nothing but to stare into space, even though aimlessness terrifies me.

One thing that struck me was how magical, glossy, and delightful were the simple actions of washing my hair, dressing carefully and putting makeup on to take that much-needed trip to the supermarket after I’d finally uploaded the edited report. Bringing treats back home for lunch, and eating slowly as I read the newspaper. I can’t describe the feeling of freedom of those simple actions.

The next day I spent almost three hours swanning around the Chadstone shopping mall. Happily surrounded by the anonymous crowd. Wonderful to freewheel, to luxuriate in unstructured time.

Until the next big job of course. I like doing lots of small editing jobs but let’s hope the next major project is at least weeks away.

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Fearless and indomitable? Me and my feminist anger

Recently I published a blog entry on the state of women’s rights in Australia, with some ideas for change. This post was the result of a gradual surge in my awareness of what was going on in the media and other major aspects of social life that was detrimental to women.

The trouble is, the more I’ve been focusing on the problem the more rattled I’ve become. So I thought I’d have another look at the issue, both at what was bugging me from an objective standpoint, and how some of my personal issues affect my feminism, sometimes detrimentally.

(Further on in this blog entry my family is going to come in for criticism. My aim here is not to bag my parents but just to make an observation about cause and effect.)

Loss of momentum
There are a couple of objective reasons for my personal feminist genie flying out of her bottle recently, although I have to say firstly that what I’m talking about here is very much the mainstream. I know there are young feminists out there, as well as older active feminists, fighting to move things forward. As a non-activist, I’m ignorant of what is probably a huge range of continuing initiatives and projects.

It’s just that this isn’t, in the main, reflected in the mainstream media. And what appears there is an incredible lack of interest in feminism – even though the issues are still as glaring as ever.

I think this is the difference between now and, say, ten years ago. Then, there was still a sense of a continuing need for change. Now, in the mainstream at least, the momentum’s just not there any more. And that is, frankly, a bit scary. We’ve had feminism since the late 1960s. If it’s abandoned as an issue of mainstream interest, what’s going to happen in the long term to women’s fragile status?

Recently a popular television program, The Gruen Transfer, ran an online discussion about a controversial fake advertisement that aimed to counter discrimination against ‘fat’ people, an ad that an agency had created for the show (in fact the discrimination under discussion was specifically the kind directed towards ‘fat’ women, as in the ‘fat chick jokes’ the panel discussed).

The discussion was all-male, and in high dudgeon I wrote to the program about my ongoing concerns about the sexism of the show as a whole, and how oblivious that discussion panel had been to the irony of the fact that they were an all-male group sitting around attacking discrimination (an article by Liz Conor with a similar point – much more articulate than my letter – appeared in The Age newspaper that weekend).

I got a very calm email back from Amelia in the show’s production office. She welcomed my letter and informed me that the reason why there were so few women on the show’s panel (just one of my complaints) was that only 6 per cent of creative directors were women. That was that. Discussion closed.

For me, of course, the discussion was just beginning. Only 6 per cent! Wasn’t that a worthwhile topic for debate, I thundered back. In fact, why not discuss on the show the following points (presenting a series of bullet points about the sexism of the Australian advertising industry). No response to this second letter, which was actually a bit more measured than the first.

Doesn’t she get it, I thought. Isn’t feminism a central issue, the major issue of our time besides climate change? How old is she? Was I becoming irrelevant, overreacting to a problem that was clearly not one at all to the younger generation? I was not a happy camper. I took her dismissal as a kind of death knell for the mainstream feminism I’d known.

Bring back the collective!
Another legitimate worry is that, again from my mainstream viewpoint, there don’t seem to be the same large numbers of nurturing groups and spaces that feminism created for women to develop their skills before taking them into the mainstream.

I’m not for a minute saying the collective is dead, or pretending that I’m up with what the women’s movement is doing these days. But in the 80s there were more cultural and activist collectives than you could poke a stick at. There were media collectives, writing collectives, printing collectives, feminist performing groups and feminist journal collectives (yes, not everyone in these groups was Leonardo Da Vinci but the same goes for men’s groups).

Activist collectives such as Healthsharing Women, women’s refuge collectives, pro-abortion groups and groups against incest and domestic violence also proliferated. Their main aims were to change the laws and conditions to improve women’s status, and empower and provide services to women, but they also enabled their members to develop important skills in an all-female environment.

Marion Halligan is just one example of a writer who benefited from being part of a collective. She is a successful baby boomer author who got a lot of early support in a women’s writing collective called Seven Writers. Why was it important that they were all women? Because such groups were less threatening for non-confident women and they didn’t have the blokey culture that could so easily intimidate and sideline.

In Australia at least, sexism and misogyny are stubborn beasts and I would argue that such nurturing spaces are still needed.

If collectives are not revivable then we need two alternatives:

More mentoring – this happens in business but needs to happen in all areas, including among high-profile successful women who are in a culture of individualism. Female comedians, for example, who don’t get a decent running on television any more, would especially benefit.

Industry campaigns – women in male-dominated industries, especially advertising and the media, need to get together and create public awareness campaigns about the need to seek gender balance in those industries, both for the good of the industry and Australia in general. These campaigns should include a call for the return of affirmative action, and if necessary should shame the organisations concerned into action.

I have some other, legitimate concerns too, before I get on to the personal stuff. As the recession grinds on and businesses get more desperate there’s more and more temptation to use images that objectify women to sell stuff.

I also reckon that since September 11 there’s been a huge surge of masculinism in Australia. In her book The Terror Dream Susan Faludi has identified this trend in the US. Why would we be immune?

This isn’t to say I’m a conspiracy theorist: I don’t think these trends need anyone to be gleefully rubbing their hands together in some backroom, planning the downfall of womankind. The thinking behind decisions that impact badly on women does not need to be conscious.

But it’s more than all this that is behind my extreme angst.

When the political is (too) personal
What worries me is that I’m taking all this very personally. I’m getting angry too often. I turn on the radio in the morning and I hear that Catholic students demonstrated against Obama when he spoke at a Catholic university because he’s pro-abortion, and I’m upset before I’ve even had my cornflakes (on the plus side I also know that he’s actually quite popular with a lot of Catholics, hopefully because of his social justice aims and credentials).

The point is, I have enough things to be angry about to write an angry letter every day, but I don’t have the time or the energy. And it’s not good to get as upset about gender discrimination as I am becoming.

Where does this river of anger stem from? My parents were both lower middle class Catholics. Although their upbringings and family life were not that similar, the households they grew up in were both a toxic mix of religion and misogyny, bound up with personality and age factors in each set of grandparents. This toxicity continues to have effects on my mother, my aunties on both sides, and at least one of my sisters, sometimes in their ability to make decisions within their households.

Sadly, my parents were unable to give me, and to various extents my sisters, any sense of personal and psychic space, or of entitlement to our own wishes, desires and feelings. They had little vision for our futures beyond marriage and motherhood.

When I see women’s needs and rights ignored, when I see the invisibility of women in mainstream media, it’s me who’s being ignored, it’s my needs that are being trampled on.

The way my disorder manifests owes much to my being a female with an intellectual ‘bent’ in my family set-up. I feel helpless to change my own state, and that’s echoed in the helplessness I feel when I encounter sex discrimination.

I don’t make much money and I don’t have a lot of social power. I’m envious of men no more intelligent than me who are on large incomes and active in the world. But it’s difficult, if not impossible, for me to directly join the fight with other women to improve our status. Except of course, through the letters I write and my blogging.

So I immediately jack up. And jacking up every day is exhausting.

What would Jessie Street do?
Jessie Street was an Australian feminist and human rights activist. She first encountered sexism at the age of seven on a ship. The boys were allowed to climb up the rigging, and as a girl she wasn’t. She knew that wasn’t fair.

She was president of the United Associations [of Women] on and off from 1930 to 1950. With women having gained the vote, and decades before second wave feminism, she campaigned for equal rights for women in the public sphere – including equal pay and the right of married women to work. Among her achievements was helping to set up Sydney’s first contraceptive clinic in 1933.

She joined the Australian Labor Party and sought pre-selection as an ALP candidate. In 1943 the Labor machine men pre-selected her for an unwinnable Liberal seat, Wentworth (ironically now the seat of Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull). They would later curse themselves for not helping her win the seat after she gained a huge number of votes. She never gave up. She actually ran for the seat a second time, in 1946, and unfortunately was unsuccessful.

In 1945 Street was chosen by prime minister Curtin as Australia’s representative to the conference that formed the United Nations, and she made sure the aims of the UN charter included women’s equality.

If Jessie Street was in my situation, she wouldn’t stop fighting. She’d simply keep channelling the anger however she could.

Rage, anger, feeling indignant
Germaine Greer has said something to the effect that rage is destructive and crippling, because it prevents the person experiencing it from clearly articulating their anger. It’s not so much rage that cripples me as a feeling of being indignant.

Many feminists get angry. But being indignant suggests that a particular situation or event has hurt your dignity. You feel that it damages you personally. Anger can be a response to wrong doing. Being indignant is a sense of outrage at something negative directed at the self. I think I would rather respond to misogyny with anger than the personalised outrage I feel twenty times a day.

So what’s to be done? I’m not suggesting I become politically neutered, and I certainly won’t stop being angry and concerned.

But I do need to cultivate some kind of radical acceptance. I live in an imperfect world. I can’t change that world, although in small ways I may be able to influence its workings. I still struggle with these basic tenets. I grew up with the refrain ‘It’s not fair!’, and the assumption behind that protest is that it should be. But life is not fair.

One solution is to watch less tele and read more. This is a goal anyway, so it dovetails well with my desire to read more. Other solutions include:

Be more ‘discriminating’ about what I do watch. I already watch Medium because I like the family set-up and the power the heroine has. If I have to watch tele, I’m going to favour shows that portray women with personal and social power (one exception will have to be The Chaser).

Instead of always focusing on the bad (and there will always be bad) focus on the good things that are happening in regards to women and in the world generally: the small victories, the big successes, the grassroots projects.

Soothe myself by watching an internet clip of KD Lang belting out ‘Crying’ or by listening to Diana Krall. Cheer on Anna Bligh, the first woman in Australia to be elected state premier rather than achieving her position through a male stepping down. Find out more about what feminists are doing.

Remind myself that, as Liz Conor pointed out in her Age opinion piece, I am relatively lucky in many ways when it comes to discrimination. Race discrimination impacts on some men in far worse ways than misogyny impacts on me, and this is another issue to stay aware of.

I’m not saying for a minute that this will solve anything. But I’m always suggesting that the ABC bring some gender balance to their programming. Perhaps I need to do the same in my own life.

The back foot
What I’m coming to accept, in thinking through some of these issues, is that this is not a good time for feminism. Yet there have always been feminists, even between first and second wave feminism (this is one of the pieces of history that gets hidden). Jessie Street was not part of a mass movement for women’s rights yet she soldiered on. Perhaps the initial gains of second wave feminism (which was, incredibly, a mass movement with millions of women, at least for a short time) are the miracle. Who can expect to live in good times with amazing social change all their lives? I’ll keep fighting, keep the flame of feminism burning, but I’m beginning to understand on a deeper level that I will never take the world with me.

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The lost cousin

There I was in the backyard of a sterile McMansion, on a clear-skied winter’s day, having conversations with cousins I had known for decades – but one of them remained elusive.

I belong to an extended Catholic family on my mother’s side. On this side alone I have 21 cousins (one of them now deceased) and there are 26 of us altogether. The generations have remained close and still continue to socialise.

Big family Christmases presided over by my grandparents have continued, with the cousins who played together as children continuing to see each other at what is an annual gathering. As they’ve grown up and married they have brought along their own children, a bevy of rowdy third cousins happily mingling.

Family traditions stretch back for decades, like the children chasing Father (sometimes 'Mary') Christmas after (s)he'd handed out the presents and made a quick exit. The sole aim of this chase was to reveal Santa's true identity and remove by force the red hat and the snowy beard.

A decent number of all three (and soon to be four) generations – the third generation is just now coming of age – still come to family gatherings, like the engagement parties and sixtieth and seventieth birthday parties that are now going on. Of course not everyone is plugged in, and some who might otherwise be fixtures currently live or are travelling overseas. I’m somewhere in the middle, choosing the gatherings I attend with care.

Annette is one of my first cousins, the oldest daughter of one of my mother’s sisters. The sisters are only two years apart, but with hugely different personalities. Annette and I are almost exactly the same age, but as a child the peripatetic existence of her family meant our friendship took a while to cement.

In early childhood there was fierce rivalry between me and my older sister Georgia for the affections of Annette. One night she came to our place for a sleepover and the three of us slept on the floor in the sunroom.

Although at that point Georgia got on much better with Annette than I did, I insisted on sleeping in the middle. Annette and Georgia clasped hands over my prone body, symbolically affirming their closeness in the face of my stubbornness.

Soon afterwards I gave up on Annette and turned to her sister Miranda for friendship. An easygoing tomboy, Miranda was two years younger than Annette.

But gradually things changed. For about three years the family lived in Melbourne, renting a humble house in the same suburb we lived in. Annette and Miranda even went to the same local Catholic school my sisters and I attended. The two of us became close and I was often at their place after school. Sometimes I stayed the night and we held midnight feasts or pleasantly scary seances, and I was allowed to watch the Sunday night 8.30 movie, a privilege denied to me at home.

Then the family were on the move again, back to the country town they’d lived in when I was a child. It was one of the many small losses of childhood but it was not a complete loss – I went and stayed with them a few times in the country. By then, sandwiched comfortably between Annette and Miranda in the friendship stakes, I experienced some of my happiest times.

In a few years they were back once more, this time living in the hills outside Melbourne where Annette’s parents had bought a milkbar. I continued to stay with them sometimes, and when I was 14, during one school hols, Annette and I felt like honorary grownups when we stayed with a much younger aunty and her small family in her newly built 'display' home in the sprouting wilds of the outer south-eastern suburbs. Precious times all of them: for me Annette had become a sister without the jealousy, anger and sibling rivalry that stopped me from enjoying the company of my actual siblings.

But as young adulthood loomed we began to grow apart – only it was Annette doing the growing, not me. I remember the precise time that I felt the old Annette had completely disappeared. With her parents she’d dropped in to our place for a flying visit one weekend, and she and I were walking back from the corner shop.

We were 16. I was still a child in many ways, scared of boys and already suffering the crippling social anxiety that would continue to dog me. By that stage she was getting to know the wild teenagers of the Dandenongs.

As we walked along Darling Road she was looking around and swinging her arms and talking too loudly and animatedly about people I had never met and had no interest in. I looked at her and wanted the old, quieter Annette back, the one who retreated into herself when she was in the wars. But I feared she was gone for good. The new one was clearly a complete fake.

Even then, with no understanding of psychology, I dimly perceived that Annette had taken on a new personality to cover up her childish insecurities rather than having outgrown them. I did not change this interpretation of the new Annette for the next three decades.

I saw Annette again, for the first time in about four years, at a recent family event. I had no expectations. I’d long ago stopped bothering to talk to her at such gatherings because she always ran away.

In earlier years, when she was still with her first husband, after a minute or two of distracted chat she would start to look around in consternation and say ‘Where’s Martin?’ and then abruptly excuse herself to go and look for him. Even I, slow on the uptake, eventually gave up. She had no interest in my life or what I was up to, and I might as well gravitate towards one of the cousins who did.

Our lives couldn’t have turned out more differently. After a false start with Martin, and with her true love Arthur, she eventually had five children. She lives a prosperous life on a large property in a house they had had built near the Hawkesbury River.

So there she was the other day, down from NSW to attend a huge family do in a too-large house I’d never stepped inside before. Her hair was dyed a stark black and looked permed, and she wore a red jacket with black trimmings. Her strong features were still striking, but like me she was undeniably middle aged: we had both recently turned 46. After all these years, I still remembered that her birthday was three weeks and three days before mine, making her a Taurus.

I hadn’t planned to talk to her, but there she was in the courtyard, on the fringes of another group, looking in my direction, and it would be churlish to ignore her. I leaned towards her. ‘We’re Facebook friends now’, I said. Another cousin was standing nearby and the three of us formed a group as we began to joke about the shortcomings of Facebook.

‘Are you on Twitter?’ I asked Annette. ‘I think it’s a complete waste of time’.

To my surprise, she didn’t know what Twitter was, so I started to explain it as best I could. We were all laughing and I was beginning to feel the old click.

An older lady came up to the group and started talking with the other cousin. Although she was addressing us all, it was one of those conversational moments when you sense a branching off is about to take place: she and the other cousin were reminiscing about a prestigious school they had both attended. It was turning into an alumni-type chat.

I didn’t feel at that point like leaving the conversation, but I could sense Annette’s impatience. For the first time I noticed that she still had the old restlessness. Her body wouldn’t stay still, and her right arm was – well – twanging. She looked as if she could begin to dance at any moment. Her head began to crane, searching around for something better. Any minute I would lose her, and this time it might be for good.

‘I’m going to get a drink’, she said and she was off.

I wonder now why I hadn’t taken charge and asked her about her children – how old the youngest was, for example, or what her oldest was doing. But perhaps I’d already decided that she wouldn’t be interested in talking to me alone. Perhaps without realising it I was playing it safe.

Later I saw her from a distance, talking in another group, and again I noticed that fluttering refusal to keep still. For the first time I looked back at our walk along Darling Road all those years ago, when I’d been so dismayed at the change in her, and I read it a bit differently.

Sure, Annette may well have been covering up her vulnerable child self, and perhaps she still was. But perhaps she was also trying to allow a new, social self to emerge, a self that was interested in the real world of human beings rather than the fantasy world of childhood that still held me captive. Perhaps the Annette that had confronted me that day was the real Annette after all.

Of course the sudden change I’d perceived all those years ago may have partly been due to Annette’s complex family circumstances, as well as the demands of puberty. But although she went on to stumble around a bit as a young adult – as most of us do – her social self eventually enabled her to find her place in the world. It certainly hasn’t stopped her being happy and successful. Perhaps all along she’s had more psychological sophistication than I’ve given her credit for.

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On (Not) Reading the Classics

I’m writing this entry for purely therapeutic reasons. It’s about an ongoing issue that I feel I have no control over, so putting it out into cyberspace might somehow, magically, transform it for me.

It’s about my reading life, which is constantly being blighted by my television life. I want to read the classics. That’s an abstract wish, but when I try to put it into practice my body and mind rebel.

(I know that this whole categorisation is a subject of scholarly dispute – for the purposes of this article, I’ll rather randomly define ‘the classics’ as any work of fiction popular enough to be in a cheap paperback edition at least 30 years after its original publication.)

Apart from those I read at school and uni, I have plodded through quite a few of them over the years (although perhaps sleep walked is a better term: what happened in The Brothers Karamazov, vols 1 and 2, and War and Peace? I couldn’t even give you the barest plot synopsis, except that the former is about addiction, a priest dies at the beginning and the brothers fight [I think] and the latter is about the Napoleonic wars and the fortunes of an upper class family and some soldiers). All those words, and so little recalled.

So what’s the problem, apart from a poor memory? Soon after I start to read a classic text, it gets too dense and I go off to the library and borrow a contemporary novel.

There are many exceptions, particularly Romantic novels filled with overblown emotion. I read Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment again a few years ago and was amazed at their emotional power. I can happily chomp through George Eliot.

Some Thomas Hardy, a tiny bit of Stendhal (again with not much plot recall), Balzac and Zola are okay, Dickens I like but any work of his takes a long time to get through. When I find a cheap edition of Vanity Fair I’ll get around to that – I already know something of the story of Becky from the miniseries, which helps.

Part of the problem is the cheap editions I tend to buy. The paper is yellow, the type tiny – not a very attractive proposition, especially at night when I do the bulk of my reading.

So what do I want to read or reread?

Currently I’m taking Kafka’s The Trial in small doses. I’ve borrowed a beautifiul hardback edition from the library. It has a nifty little page finder, text in a nice, good-sized font, and thick white paper. But I can only read small chunks at a time. The images are very strong but I’m experiencing too much of the hero’s bewilderment and sense of disorientation for comfort. And of course it’s a translation: however good, a translation is likely to be a bit dry compared with the original.

I have a cheap edition of Byron’s Don Juan and think it will be a sin if I never read this. It’s like wasting someone else’s genius. I have tried fruitlessly to put myself in the position of the typical female reader of the time: this spicy book would have been considered highly risque, liable to send me into paroxysms of passion that would cause me to madly wield my fan and take pinches of snuff. Perhaps if I could view it as a page turner I could race through it?

But of course it’s not as simple as a question of subject position. If I tried to race through works like that I’d be stumbling over the myriad associations that were then familiar but now make no sense. As far as I’m concerned a kind of translation in the form of notes is required for any work written before the twentieth century. And referring to notes slows down the pace, and therefore the fun.

That’s the difference between me and the academic or intellectual: I’m curious about the lives of people in other times but I need someone who has covered the territory to step forward and guide me, making the strange and unfamiliar emotionally comprehensible. I want to feel the common humanity of the writer and the world they’ve created but it doesn’t come easy.

There are so many references that would have been familiar to the book’s intended readers but now require scholars of archaelogical determination to nut out their meanings. And the tone is often so foreign. I admire the researchers because they can see through the superficial differences to the unchanging human concerns of the writer.

I read Dante’s Inferno a few years ago and it was a mammoth task. Again, very few of the strong, compelling images have stayed with me. The ending has though, and I almost gasped at the beautiful irony: the final circle of hell as a place of stasis so utter that it is frozen rather than burning.

But I got stalled by Thoreau’s Walden. Before starting this book I mistakenly thought it would be a cinch because of the subject matter, so akin to contemporary concerns – a protest against excessive materialism. But it soon began to irritate me. One reason was that there were a few lines that I simply could not make sense of – perhaps theythe language just too idiomatic.

The second reason was that, although I don’t consider myself that materialistic, the anti-materialism of the writer was just too strong for me: I wanted to argue with him about some of the advantages of modern life. That he was intent on proving how few mod cons one needs to live a good life was admirable, but his fundamentalist approach was too much. Still, I do want to finish the book.

I have very subtle ways of sabotaging my reading life. My electricity company gave me a free subscription to Marie Claire a while ago so the magazine magically arrives in the letterbox when the going gets difficult. And even buying the local broadsheet once a week – the Saturday issue is pretty crammed – means that I’ve always got old newspapers to catch up on.

There’s some good tele on at the moment and my willingness to sacrifice favourite shows is at an all-time low – I watch an average of two hours a night, sometimes less, sometimes more. And finally, here are my classic reasons for not reading the classics, given with the twelve-step adage in mind that we’re only as sick as our secrets:

The gas heater steals the oxygen from the room and makes me tired.

My brain’s not what it used to be.

I’ll just forget it all anyway so what’s the point?

I’ve read enough of the classics. From now on I’ll just focus on contemporary writing.

I never learned Greek or Latin. There’s no point reading the translations of works in these languages when the original would be so much better.

I’m lonely and tele keeps me company.

There! I’ve waved the magic blog wand, and hope all these excuses dissolve into nothingness.

Better go now. I have to see what awaits poor Joseph K in The Trial.

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